Islam and the Blues with Dr. Sylviane Diouf

Through images and recordings, award-winning historian Sylviane A. Diouf of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture illustrates how the blues, which originated in the American South, may have evolved from the techniques of the recitation of the Qur’an and the call to prayer in West Africa. She plays early blues recordings side by side with African recordings of the call to prayer and invites audiences to catch the similarities.